Digital Rights Management in HTML text
Thursday, February 28, 2008Digital Rights Management (DRM) is kind of ubiquitous these days. In 2008 there is no sharing that brilliant Barry Manilow album purchased from iTunes. Nor can you distribute the Sid James classic Carry On Henry downloaded from xBox Live to your closest mates. No longer does simple conscience or morality stop you – DRM does.
This is all well and good but where do you draw the line?
Today during my lunchtime scan of my favourite blogs I dropped by one of interest from Frank Arrigo an US based Australian Microsoft evangelist. He posted on his recent mention in the Australian Financial Review. I proceeded to follow the link to the AFR website and became quite engaged on an article that discussed the ever growing Australian contingent at the Redmond campus.
This is all well and good but where do you draw the line?
Today during my lunchtime scan of my favourite blogs I dropped by one of interest from Frank Arrigo an US based Australian Microsoft evangelist. He posted on his recent mention in the Australian Financial Review. I proceeded to follow the link to the AFR website and became quite engaged on an article that discussed the ever growing Australian contingent at the Redmond campus.
While I was reading the AFR article I noticed something funny. As I highlighted text in the article I noticed every second character had been switched out with a space. How bizarre!
See screenshot below:
Further investigation unfolded they use a fixed width font,create two layers, each with half of the letters and non breaking space (NBSP) interlaced between every real character. To put this together they use CSS to overlay the two panels and then they get the final text.
Think of all the issues with this technique. The use of a floating div tag to overlay one set of content over another would create a massive strain on server and bandwidth. Coupled with this, the accessibility of the site is non existent. Any screen reader would take the text as is and would output absolute gibberish successfully rendering the site unusable in this instance. Finally using your web browsers search facility to find copy in the body is useless too.
The underlying issue I have with this technique is the lack focus the AFR gives to usability. The Australian Blind and Vision statistics indicate that as of 2004, 0.25% of the population suffered from complete vision loss and 2.36% suffer from some soft of visual imparity. Read what you want into these stats but either way the Australian Financial Review is severely isolating a good proportion of the population with their site.
It's quite amazing that the AFR have gone to all this trouble to stop a user from copying and pasting an article. Especially given that anyone with a background in Javascript could circumvent this in about 5 minutes.
So the Australian Financial Review have successfully implemented DRM but at what cost? Well they’ve thrown out all accessibility, usability and readability not to mention any chance of a Google index.
Anthony Harrison, Project Manager
1 Comments:
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Anthony said...
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Post a CommentUPDATE:
As of publishing date of this blog the AFR article in mention above has now been locked out as subscriber only content. Other sample articles depicting the use of this DRM technique can be found here, here and here.